Anthony John Mell, MD, MBA, Receives Distinguished Alumni Award

Anthony John Mell, MD, MBA, assistant professor of pediatrics at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine, has received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the Oley Valley Community Education Foundation. The award is given to alumni who demonstrate outstanding achievement in their profession, a commitment to humanitarian efforts and volunteerism, service in their communities, and/or service to the Oley Valley School District in Pennsylvania.

Mell, who is one of the inaugural Ravin Davidoff Health Equity Fellows at Boston Medical Center (BMC), studies health equity, implementation sciences and health system management. He teaches health equity content to residents and medical students through his roles as the leadership in equity and advocacy course director and as a health equity rounds faculty mentor. In those roles, he created and operationalized an 18-month-long health equity curriculum consisting of monthly in-person discussion-based sessions and professional development modules with accompanying asynchronous content.

He also mentors residents to create specific case-based health equity conferences that are presented to the pediatric department in a grand rounds format. Finally, he has led teaching sessions on racism across multiple departments and to all levels of learners, medical students, residents and faculty.

Mell’s areas of interest include: quality improvement and implementation science; racial socialization; the care of criminal legal system-involved youth and youth in the foster care system; the deconstruction of the school-to-prison pipeline; economic mobility, population health management and disability justice.

Mell was born and raised in the rural community of Oley Valley where his father worked as a crane operator and his mother worked in the school cafeteria. Throughout middle and high school, he worked as a janitor and landscaper before attending Fairleigh Dickinson University where he received both his undergraduate (BS) and master’s degree (MBA).

While completing his undergraduate degree, he also worked closely with several disinvested communities including adults with autism, youth in the foster care system and youth in the criminal legal system. Mell completed his medical education at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Manhattan where he worked closely with the immigrant community in East Harlem. He completed his residency training at the Boston combined residency program at Boston Children’s Hospital and BMC in the leadership in equity and advocacy track.